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Scientists at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have discovered that our galaxy is surrounded by a halo of hot gasses. If confirmed, this could solve a major physics mystery.

Astronomers working with NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory have detected what they believe is a "halo" of extremely hot gasses surrounding our own Milky Way Galaxy. The gaseous area is huge - stretching out with about a 100 kiloparsec radius. In other words, it's over 650,000 light years across - which is about 6 times the diameter of the Milky Way.

Previous studies have already discovered a "warm mass" halo around the Galaxy, but this new find demonstrates that there's a whole other halo - hotter and much more massive. The gasses found within the halo are extremely hot - the astronomers estimate that the temperatures are about 1 million Kelvin, or about 1.8 million degrees Farenheit. There's also a lot in the gas. The astronomers estimate that the halo contains the mass of over 100 billion Suns. Which is about the same mass as our own Milky Way galaxy.

"Our work shows that, for reasonable values of parameters and with reasonable assumptions, the Chandra observations imply a huge reservoir of hot gas around the Milky Way," said co-author Smita Mathur in a press release. "It may extend for a few hundred thousand light-years around the Milky Way or it may extend farther into the surrounding local group of galaxies. Either way, its mass appears to be very large."

That high level of mass, apart from being intrinsically cool, also provides the potential to solve a major mystery in physics: the "missing baryon" problem.

Baryons are the subatomic particles responsible for over 99% of the mass in the universe. (The protons and neutrons in every atom are baryons.) They're pretty well understood, but there's one weird puzzle about them. Based on observations from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and other instruments, astronomers know what the density of baryons in the universe is. But attempts to count those baryons has only yielded about half the baryons that scientists know exist.

However, if this hot halo of gasses is confirmed, it would account for virtually all of the missing baryons from the Milky Way. Assuming that other galaxies of similar hot halos, this discovery could pave the way for solving what for over a decade has been a perplexing problem.

This is only a preliminary finding. And there's still a lot of work to be done when it comes to understanding both the halo and its astronomical implications. But it's an exciting one that, if confirmed, gives astronomers a big leg up in understanding the makeup of the universe.